


Caretaker

by Morgana



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:45:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgana/pseuds/Morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a look at one of the Dollhouse's employees</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caretaker

She still wasn't entirely sure how she'd ended up here. When she'd graduated from nursing school, she'd planned on getting a job in a hospital, helping people recover after their operations, or maybe taking care of babies on the OB floor. Not the ER, though - too much blood and guts for her taste. Where some of her classmates had been all about helping people, for her it was more about a job that would always be there, since there would always be someone needed to take care of sick people. And there would definitely always be sick people.  
  
She'd never counted on getting a call from Adelle DeWitt offering a salary and benefits that were almost too unreal to be true.  
  
Three meetings and countless signatures later, she was a Rossum employee, even if her name would never appear on any official company roster. Instead of changing adult diapers and cleaning up vomit, she served up banana pancakes and guava papaya juice in a luxury dining room with five star cuisine. Instead of sponge baths, her charges took long hot showers while she laid out yoga pants and tank tops. She didn't have to listen to endless, rambling stories or deal with the ravings of dementia and Alzheimer's; instead, she saw open, innocent smiles on blank faces and heard quiet chitchat that never went deeper than the most casual of pleasantries.  
  
It wasn't exactly how she'd expected things to go, that was for sure. There were classes that they all took, from psychology and massage to tai chi and fashion consultation, but she guessed that made sense. This wasn't really an ordinary job in an ordinary workplace, so it stood to reason that they all needed more than ordinary skills.  
  
They weren't supposed to have favorites, but she supposed it was inevitable that they all ended up with them anyway. It was the same all around the world, from nursing homes to hospitals to here - there were those that just crept in and ended up being the ones you cared more about, the ones you were more concerned about, the ones you went the extra mile for. She and her coworkers were no different, their favorites changing as their charges came and went around them.   
  
Some days she felt more like a nanny than a nurse, shepherding people from one place to another, urging food on them when they didn't show too much interest in eating, encouraging them to get their exercise and rest. As the weeks slipped into months, then turned slowly into years, she came to realize that it wasn't necessarily all that different from tending to people in a rest home, after all. The setting was different, but the routine, the guidance of the lives of those in her care... that was exactly the same.   
  
No, this definitely wasn't the career she'd planned to have. And yet, at the end of the day, she was what she'd been trained to be: a caretaker.


End file.
